Oh No, Did Robert Mueller Do PEE TAPE LIBELS?

NARRATOR: Pretty sure he didn't.

The Steele Dossier says many things, but the most popular thing it says is that Donald Trump went to Moscow in 2013 for the Miss Universe pageant after Billy Graham's birthday party in North Carolina, and was immediately presented with a special Slip 'N Slide covered in Russian hooker pee in the presidential suite at the Moscow Ritz Carlton. And there were tapes! (Allegedly!)

Nobody has ever known if it was true, false, or half true in some sort of way we don't understand yet. Maybe it wasn't on that particular trip to Moscow! Maybe it wasn't a pee tape, just garden variety peener parties with Russian hookers! Maybe it's a poop tape! (Oh dear God nooooooooooooooo .)

We know for pretty much certain that Vladimir Putin has Trump over a barrel though, even if the primary kompromat he has is simply that he helped Trump steal the Oval Office, which would have the natural effect of leaving Trump more than slightly indebted to the man.  

Anyway, there is new pee tape news! Aren't you positively leaky with excitement about that? We'll get to it in a sec, but first some quick background on why we're talkin' 'bout this:

The Mueller Report talks about the pee tape very briefly, in the Volume 2 Obstruction Of Justice section, regarding James Comey's January 2017 briefing for the incoming president, where he took Trump aside and said, "Bro. Listen. What you do with Muscovite pee hookers is YOUR BUSINESS, but you should know there is this dossier of unsubstantiated intel out there, and it has this allegation, and you should know it might come out soon." And it did. And Trump lost his fucking shit, of course, because he was pretty sure the FBI was trying to Deep State him by threatening him with pee tape allegations. (Guess he's just too used to working with the Russians and didn't understand that's not how we do things in America.)

But in a footnote to that section is the far more interesting news that Trump most likely probably knew about the pee tape allegations months before that, just before the election in October 2016. Let's go to the footnote on pages 27 and 28 of that section:

In Wonkette's liveblog of the Mueller Report, we translated that section like so:

So on October 30, 2016, MICHAEL COHEN got a text from a Russian, Giorgi Rtskhiladze, who told him he "stopped flow" (LOL) of tapes from Russia. Rtskhiladze said rumor was people associated with the CROCUS GROUP had the tapes. CROCUS GROUP is the Agalarovs, Trump's longtime buddies who threw the pageant with him. (Kinda makes you see that music video Emin Agalarov did about the pee tape in a different light, don't it? A yellower light.) COHEN talked to TRUMP about it. RTSKHILADZE said he heard they were fake tapes, but he didn't tell COHEN that.

And that's all we got. UNTIL NOW.

Because Giorgi Rtskhiladze, who is actually a GEORGIAN-American businessman who's dealt with Donald Trump in the past, is super mad about how Robert Mueller typed out his texts about the tapes, which may or may not exist, and which may or may not be a real PISSER for the president to deal with, were they ever to come out, assuming they exist, which they might not, how would we know. Rtskhiladze says Mueller made it sound way worse than it is, which would be BAD MUELLER, BAD! He's also pissed Mueller called him Russian.

A Georgian-American businessman is accusing Special Counsel Robert Mueller of "glaring inaccuracies" and sensationalizing texts about alleged salacious tapes involving Donald Trump's 2013 trip to Moscow.

In a letter to U.S. Attorney General William Barr on Tuesday, lawyers for Giorgi Rtskhiladze demanded a retraction to a footnote in Mueller's 448-page report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. [...]

The FBI and Mueller's team "spliced the dialogue to produce the ugly insinuations and allegations of Footnote 112 to attract publicity -- all while impugning Mr. Rtskhiladze's character," according to his attorney, A. Scott Bolden.

Well that sounds like quite the accusation! Also that's not quite how this works, as Robert Mueller is not BuzzFeed and will not likely be issuing "retractions."

Anyway, let's dig deeper and find out how Robert Mueller libeled Giorgi Rtskhiladze and drew dicks all over his character. Bloomberg reports that Rtskhiladze's lawyer sent the full text exchange he had with Cohen, in order to clear things up.

As far as we can tell the main differences between that and what Mueller are printed are that Mueller omitted the word "some" from the first text, which seems immaterial to us, but according to his lawyers is BAD, because they somehow believe that the omission suggests Rtskhiladze had seen the tapes, and why that would matter is ??? ... PROFIT!

The big reveal in the next text is that Rtskhiladze was "not sure of the content," but that "person in Moscow was bragging had tapes from Russia trip." Which ... would seem to square exactly with Mueller's footnote, IF YOU READ THE WHOLE THING, especially the last sentence where Mueller reports on his own interview with Rtskhiladze, who said he "was told the tapes were fake," but didn't tell Michael Cohen that for some reason . Anyone with an ounce of reading comprehension skills would naturally infer that meant Rstkhiladze hadn't actually seen the alleged tapes.

But that's literally what seems to be his problem, and why he is demanding RETRACTION!

Rtskhiladze ... said in an interview Wednesday that his texts had been misinterpreted to mean he'd seen and destroyed compromising tapes of Trump, when he was only conveying a rumor.

Yeah, we never thought that.

"It's not something I took action on," Rtskhiladze said in the interview. "It was not a fact, just a stupid rumor."

Cool, bro, we get that it's a rumor . However, "stopped the flow" does seem to suggest some sort of action-taking, though we don't have the foggiest idea what action that might be. At this point it seems like an argument between Rtskhiladze and his own text messages, to be quite honest.

Anyway, Bloomberg reports that Rtskhiladze told Mueller who his friend is who told him about the ALLEGED pee tapes THAT MIGHT NOT EVEN EXIST AND IF THEY DO THEY ARE FAKE ALLEGEDLY, and also that Rtskhiladze is going to testify for the House Intel Committee at Adam Schiff's request, so maybe we'll get to liveblog a bunch of pee tape stories one day soon here, wouldn't that be a gas, can't hardly wait.

OH HI IT IS YOUR OPEN THREAD!

[ Bloomberg ]

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